Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/398

 "I don't know. I haven't any." He shook his head, in a helpless perplexity.

She snorted. "Yuh young heathen! Yuh deserve no better than bein' married be an alderman. That'll teach yuh to go to church. It's well fer yuh that I'm a married woman—with daughters like me." She waved him to the door. "Go get a cab—an' a weddin' ring!" She wailed: "An' my dinner in the oven!" She stopped him: "Wait! Do yuh know the size? No! There's a man now! As helpless as the babe at a christ'nin'! Have y' even a bit o' string? No, not a bit!" She caught up Margaret's glove from the dresser. "Take that—to a jeweller's. Go on! Be off with yuh! Take yer hat, man!" She drove him out, and he went clutching the glove in one hand, his hat in the other. She called down the stairs after him: "It's a four wheeler yuh'll want, mind yuh!" She shrieked, at the next landing: "An' a witness! I'm one! Yuh'll want two!"

If Don had any clear idea of what he was doing at the time, certainly he had no clear recollection, afterwards, of how he had done it. He found what he supposed was a jeweller's shop—though subsequently, in pointing it out to Margaret, he saw that it was a pawnbroker's. He bought a ring—that must have been an "unredeemed pledge"—without knowing what he paid for it. The man behind the glass show-case called him back to give him the glove, which he had forgotten; and he drifted down the street, looking for a livery stable, holding the ring in his bare hand like a child with a penny, struggling absent-mindedly to put on the